Saturday, January 20, 2007

Power: It's All About What You Do With It

Yet another excellent profile on M. Dion can be found here. It's lengthy, but definitely worth the time on a wintry Saturday morning. For those not familiar with the bid to run Dion out of parliament, I'll include this short excerpt.

That was not enough for Paul Martin. When he took over from Mr. Chrétien in 2003, the new prime minister dumped Mr. Dion from the cabinet. Led by David Herle, the coterie of advisers that surrounded Mr. Martin considered Mr. Dion a liability in Quebec. The prime minister's Quebec lieutenant, Jean Lapierre, called the Clarity Act a “useless” piece of legislation.

“That was very hard for Stéphane,” says Pierre Pettigrew. “He was someone who had gone into politics for all the right reasons.”

Then a rival, Martin-backed candidate started selling Liberal memberships in Saint-Laurent—Cartierville. “When they tried to take away his riding, that is the moment he became a politician,” Ms. Krieber declares. “It was not an ideological debate. It was a power struggle.

“They could have asked me how to get rid of him and I would have told them: ‘Leave him alone, ignore him.' Instead they provoked him. . . . You know, my husband is a romantic knight.”

Does anyone else find it dignified how Stephane has treated those who have previously sought to marginalise him? Either that or he's even more Machiavellian than we all suspected. This is a good thing.

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“My first interest was for the society of animals, not of man,” he recalls. “We had a neighbour named Gaston Moisan, a biologist who was a deputy minister of natural resources. He set traps for the rabbits, to band them, and used to take me with him. He was 5-foot-7, but he was a giant for me.”

A charming childhood anecdote — except, according to Mr. Moisan, it never happened. “I don't know how he could have imagined that,” the retired bureaucrat and university professor says. “I had nothing to do with Stéphane. And I never sensed any interest on his part for my work.”